Now let me tell a story. Asclepiodotus writes that a number of men were sent by Philip down an old mine that had long since been abandoned; they were to explore how rich its deposits were, what state it was in, whether past greed had left anything for future generations. They descended with plenty of lights, enough to last many days; then, when exhausted by the long journey, they saw enormous rivers and huge lakes of stagnant water, like our own, not cramped by the earth weighing down on them, but with plenty of open space—and they could not help shuddering at the sight. I read this with great pleasure. For I realized that our generation is struggling with vices that are not new but inherited from long ago; in our day it was not the first time that greed had rummaged in the veins of earth and rock and searched in the darkness for what was inadequately concealed. ose ancestors of ours whom we are con- stantly praising, whom we complain that we so little resemble, were led on by their hopes to hack into mountains, and stood on top of their gain, beneath their ruin. Before King Philip of Macedon there were people who would pursue money into the very deepest re- cesses,and,though endowed with upright, freespirits,would stoop to enter those caves where no contrast between night and day ever penetrated. What great hope made them leave the daylight behind? Human beings stand erect, facing the stars, so what great necessity made them bend down, buried them, and plunged them to the depths of the earth’s interior, to dig out gold that is no less dangerous to search for than to possess? For its sake they dug tunnels and crawled after their grubby, undependable plunder, forgetting the daylight, forgetting the better world on which they had turned their backs. Does the earth lie as heavy on any corpse as it did on those people, over whom great greed threw the weight of the earth,whom it robbed of the sky, whom it buried in the depths where that foul poison lurks? They were bold enough to descend to where they encountered a new natural order: earth suspended above them, winds blowing aimlessly in the darkness, grim springs of water owing for no one’s benefit, and deep, endless night. Then when they have done that, they are afraid of the underworld!

From “On Winds” in Naturales Quaestiones, this English translation by Hine. I hear this passage reverberate in language and theme throughout Tolkien and
“Middle-Earth.” He was, after all, an eminent Classics scholar before he wrote his bestsellers. It is striking just how clearly a short text can affect, color, and shape one’s imagination, and even one’s worldview.

[…] people who watched out for hail coming. When they had given a signal that hail was imminent, what do you suppose? That people ran for their cloaks or their waterproofs? No, they all performed their own sacrifices, one person with a lamb, another with a chicken. Instantly those clouds turned away, once they had tasted a bit of blood. That makes you laugh? Listen to what will make you laugh even more. If anyone had neither a lamb nor a chicken, as an inexpensive alternative he turned on himself, and, so that you do not think clouds are greedy or cruel, he pricked his finger with a really sharp stylus and performed a sacrifice with the blood. The hail turned away from his tiny farm no less than from those where it had been appeased with larger victims.

Transformation into a pumpkin (from Seneca: apocolocyntosis); used esp. with reference to the elevation to divine status of the Roman emperor Claudius. Hence allusively: extravagant or absurdly uncritical glorification; an instance of this.

In political science – and the social sciences in general – there is a perennial debate about the character of change – whether change comes in waves or if instead it is cyclical. This is most prominent in discussions clarifying and giving shape to the nature of revolution, a focal concern in the West since first Mercantilism and then Enlightenment triggered modalities of regicide, revolt, and rebellion across formerly feudal Europe, thus paving the way for republicanism, parliamentarianism, representational democracy, and other liberal and self-governing forms of government in tandem with rational (and irrational) arguments against divinized hierarchies and monarchical power [NOTE: our newest augmentations to participatory governance were shaped to accommodate the Industrial Revolution and, even more recently, the Digital Information age; exactly what these tweaks were (beyond a widening definition of citizen) and their larger significance remain contentious and on-going]. A historical generality can be drawn: anything which hampered (or seemed to hamper) the cultural flow of the age (be it the flow of goods, ideas, capital, binary code, etc. ) was seen as a form of tyranny, a word that still today harkens back to the authoritarian rule of unchecked kings, and sentenced (sometimes swiftly, sometimes haphazardly) to be lopped-off. The debate between waves and cycles has to do with explaining the continuity of tyrannical hampering (i.e. Why does authoritarian injustice keep bubbling up after both rhetorical advancements and cultural practices – even laws! – become bedrocks of developed civilizations?) – and the always-recurrent response or corrective to privileged impingements, now ambiguously referred to simply as “change”. Is change seasonal, or is change generative?

This well-known dualism is strangely united in its use of ecologically-centered metaphors. Waves are as well known a natural phenomena as any; when one thinks of how metaphorically they apply to political analysis of revolutions, it is hard not to think of Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”. The idea is clear: the phenomenon is a one-off swelling tied to the contingency of the moment (the political philosophy of Alain Badiou and his notion of the “Event” seems closely related). On the other hand, the cyclical or seasonal metaphor is equally rooted in ecological consciousness. There is in fact no true cycle outside of the natural world, merely analogies, or else a mechanical rotation, which is a synthetic (robotic) imitation/doubling of a cyclical process. Claude Monet’s “Haystack” series is illustrative of the idea as it relates to our understanding of historical revolutions: different but not different; each historical event offering up a variant refraction of another (or all others); slight shifts sometimes apprehended imperceptibly, other times seen as unheimlich. The issue that these ecology-minded metaphors pose is that ecological change is essential to explain socio-cultural change, yet at the same time, it is ecological change which is now thetyrannical thing. This the case whether one is a tree-hugging environmentalist or a hoax-mongering conspiracy theorist: ecology – including the ecological forms of waves and cycles – hampers cultural flow. Social and political change in an ecologically terrifying world has, therefore, paradoxically lost – or is in the process of losing – its metaphors.

The problem is classic chicken-and-egg algebra, and not unlike etymological questions that surround ancient myths. Take the word odyssey as a structural example: Homers’ Odyssey is the story of Odysseus’s great odyssey. When we use the word odyssey now, are we using a word that is itself being poeticized by the Greeks, or is it only after the story of Odysseus that we then use the word that first referred to Odysseus’s-quest to now mean epic-journey? (This is an especially improbable head-scratcher when you think about how many hundreds of years the story was orally circulated before it was finally transcribed) Is The Odyssey a story of a prescribed word or a word born of a story? In political and social terms, global warming has returned us to a place of similarly uncertain origins, a “nonlocality” where historical causalities seem to have arrived in a state of suspended animation.

Seneca unwittingly points to such a suspension or gap in On the Shortness of Life:

Men are tight-fisted in keeping control of their fortunes, but when it comes to the matter of wasting-time, they are positively extravagant in the one area where there is honor in being miserly.

This quote pops with irony in our age of click-bait, fake news, and touch screens, but his simple point (Why waste your life?) is undermined by something more deeply disturbing: Is life nothing more than wasting-time? David Foster Wallace’s repetitive use of “wastoid” in The Pale King makes this point well: something at first mocking becomes descriptive and in the end a poignant rephrasing of “human”. Importantly, both Seneca and Wallace still rely on an ecological metaphor to shape their rhetorical/poetical expressions, as the abstraction of time is not mechanized without the observable change of the natural world, in this sense wasting, decomposition, decay. The day before last, Stephen Hawking said we wastoids have roughly one more millennia to whizz toward another rock because this one won’t fit the bill. It is hard to imagine a future where technical marvels advance while the foundations of our understanding of the world – the world itself – becomes violently uninhabitable.